Earlier this week I was interviewed by Philip Sherburne about the mix I have released on CD. We talked about why the format matters today and, I think proverbially, it matters tomorrow. Today we announce the thing (ARPO) as it also is - an artist album - and I wanted to share the sort of editors letter I wrote explaining my thoughts about where the DJ mix is at today and the reasons behind the project. This piece opened up the ARPO zine.

It was important for me to use this project to make this case, but I had another reason for presenting it as a mix that I didn’t mention. I have always found club music LPs too often bore me. Even when the music is great, the structure can be insipid. There are a couple of formulas that are rarely deviated from, and often the music itself doesn’t really serve the wonderful scope that the LP format can offer. ARPO was, in essence, my first attempt at presenting a body of club tracks. I wanted to present them in a format that I think best serves club music - a mix - and to state that we need more physical DJ mixes to shape the general landscape of this media. The internet cannot do that alone. It is too shapeless. The markers, the series, the sites within are too endless. And endlessness depreciates meaning and form.

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In the convo with Philip I mentioned what had happened with the cassette over the last decade or so. It has become a format that allows for a particular kind of release. It has fostered certain kinds of sounds and scenes, and that has been a great plus for music culture, in particular ambient and noisier corners of our culture. Whilst this little piece looks back, the point is to look forward and say that the CD can do the same for an aspect of DJ culture.

So, here’s that piece and yes, the album in all its forms is out October 3rd.

What is the DJ mix in 2025? Its online. Online its every form of mix: the live recording from the festival you went to, the renowned club you didn’t, the imagined space a dj wants to channel, it’s radio, podcasts, the calling card, the anniversary celebration of a magazine’s series, and we haven’t even got to a boiler room or twitch cast yet. It’s a fluid space where hierarchies are somehow inverted and reinforced at the same time. Within this vast culture there is little to distinguish between the good, the bad and the bizarre. It’s messy and never ending. The disposable nature of dance music reinforced by the interminable nature of our online world. The timeline doesn’t rewind. New day, new mix from here, there and everywhere. There’s a lot that’s been gained in this fluid flattening, and some things that are in short supply.

This is an overview, not a protest. What’s in short supply? The clue is in that observation of a flattening. Flattening culture does some good. It changes entry points and usually increases the general mass - more people can access more in whatever way they want. But what goes is a landscape that contains character. Where are the hills to the flatlands? The things that stand alone or form a little cluster of intrigue around them?

I grew up in Camden. Up until a certain moment about a decade ago, Camden Market always sold tapes bootlegged from gigs and, in the years before, tapes pilfered from promoter’s archives of various London-wide raves. Since the early 90s the CD formed a counterpoint to the under-the-counter culture of mixtapes. CDs were released in artful series. They had major licensing budgets and lavish artwork. They were complimented by vinyl editions of unmixed tracks. They formed cultural benchmarks that set the bar in respect of the DJ mix and distilled scenes and moments. Northern Exposure, Journeys By DJs, Global Underground, fabric, Balance, INCredible… the list is long of these defining mixes. They shaped the landscape.

Beyond this tape/CD situation lay the internet. Many argued over the last 20 years that the internet was best place for mixes due to the lack of format constraints. A mix could be uninterrupted for any length of time. I disagree. It’s nice we can theoretically have all 31 hours of Marco Carola’s peak performance at Sunwaves this year, but I also appreciate some focus. Some judgements made to hone in on something that cuts through the noise with precision. In many ways the CD is a perfect format for this. 74 mins to capture the element of something, a moment. In the words I used for the mix I recorded for the fabric series, ‘a polaroid of a DJ in a specific time and place.’

If you need to go deeper than one mix you can have a double pack, a triple pack or, in the case of Laurent Garnier’s Excess Luggage, a 5 CD compendium designed to capture a great DJ in his prime across the different approaches he took to his craft. The packaging provided context and stories behind the mixes. The stories contained histories of places - Detroit and Paris’s Rex Club - that were critical in the evolving of electronic music.

There was a year or two in the early 00s when CDs were usually on the covers of club culture magazines. Regularly these were people entry points to certain sounds and scenes. They were often good ones too. Some of my own highlights:

Jon Sa Trincha’s - Naked Ibiza: Salinas Beach

Timo Maas - Dirty Trancing

Osymyso - 4am Eternal (A Truly Twisted Post-Club Chill-Out Selection)

Sander Kleinenberg - Tranceglobal Airways

Roger Sanchez - The Global House Experience

A:xus - The Guidance Collection

It’s one of these CDs that Ogazon picks for her choice to highlight in this zine - DJ Lottie’s The True Sound Of… Ibiza Nights. The zine that you are reading makes the case for the CDs continued place in our landscape. In our internet dominated landscape physical formats matter. They remain something that can give shape to the amorphous. They can serve the music in a way the internet cannot, and I believe we should maintain something of it as listeners and consumers, fans who like something richer than pixels and streams. So along with Ogazon, Eris Drew looks at Mark Farina’s Seasons mix CDs that he distributed through Gramaphone in Chicago. Batu examines the crucial role CDs play in the development of Afro House, and DJ NORTHERN summons the joy of EZ’s Pure Garage mix. Then we have Shanti Celeste, Kilopatrah Jones, Darwin, Skee Mask and Parris sharing little things from their routines that keep them grounded because the rhythms that protect us are not always musical…

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